The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [308]
In January 1945, as the Red Army’s Vistula–Oder operation rolled forward and Warsaw was about to fall, three senior members of Guderian’s OKH planning Staff – a colonel and two lieutenant-colonels – were arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated about their seeming questioning of orders from OKW. Only after Guderian spent much time and energy intervening were the lieutenant-colonels freed, although the colonel was sent to a concentration camp. ‘The essence of the problem lay in Hitler’s Führer-system of unquestioning obedience to orders clashing with the General Staff’s system of mutual trust and exchange of ideas, against a background of Hitler’s class consciousness and genuine distrust of the General Staff following the failed putsch.’56
At a two-and-a-half-hour Führer-conference starting at 4.20 p.m. on 27 January 1945, Hitler explained his thinking with regard to the Balkans, and in particular the oilfields of the Lake Balaton region in Hungary. Attended by Göring, Keitel, Jodl, Guderian, five other generals and fourteen other officials, he ranged over every front of the war, with the major parts of the agenda covering weather conditions, Army Group South in Hungary, Army Group Centre in Silesia, Army Group Vistula in Pomerania, Army Group Kurland, the Eastern Front in general, the west, ammunition allotments, Allied advances in Italy, the north, the situation at sea, and political and personnel questions.57 ‘Our main problem is the fuel issue at the moment,’ Guderian told Hitler, who replied: ‘That’s why I’m concerned, Guderian.’ Pointing at the Balaton region, he added, ‘If something happens down there, it’s over. That’s the most dangerous point. We can improvise everywhere else, but not there. I can’t improvise with the fuel.’58 He had been speaking of the importance of keeping hold of the Balkans, largely for its copper, bauxite and chromium deposits, as well as oil, since mid-1943.59 The Sixth Panzer Army, reconstituted after its exertions in the Ardennes offensive, was ordered to Hungary, from where it could not be extracted.
Defending Hungary accounted for seven of the eighteen Panzer divisions still available to Hitler on the Eastern Front, a massive but necessary commitment. By January 1945, the month that the battle of the Bulge was lost, Hitler had only 4,800 tanks and 1,500 combat aircraft in the east, to fight Stalin’s 14,000 and 15,000 respectively.60 The Red Army’s 12 January offensive finally came to an end a month later on the lower reaches of the River Oder, a mere 44 miles from the suburbs of Berlin. It had been an epic advance, but had temporarily exhausted the USSR. Yet his troops’ proximity to the German capital gave Stalin a greatly increased voice at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, called to discuss the endgame in Europe, and to try to persuade the Soviets to undertake a major involvement in the war against Japan.
Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin met only twice, at the Teheran Conference in November 1943 and the Yalta Conference in February 1945, although they maintained a very regular correspondence. The first letter was sent by Roosevelt soon after Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, and the 304th, also sent by him, was dated 11 April 1945, the day before he died. By the time of Yalta it was Roosevelt who was making all the running attempting to keep the alliance together. With the Red Army firmly in occupation of Poland, and Soviet divisions threatening Berlin itself when the conference opened, there was effectively nothing that either FDR or Churchill could have done to safeguard political freedom in eastern Europe, and both knew it. Roosevelt certainly tried everything – including straightforward flattery – to try to bring Stalin round to a reasonable stance on any number of important post-war issues, such as the creation of a meaningful United Nations, but he overestimated what his undoubted aristocratic charm could achieve with the homicidal son of a drunken Georgian cobbler.
Addressing Congress in March 1945, Roosevelt reported that Yalta